My latest show: Keitaigirls

I just finished my latest show “Keitaigirls” in the Uplink Factory in Shibuya, Tokyo. Every 2 months about 20 photographers present their work there in front of a great audience (it’s always packed!) and I decided to show my Keitaigirls. To be perfectly honest, I am not a great presenter, I kinda get too nervous in front of an audience and forget what I wanted to say…after its over I always remember the witty puns again, but then its too late. Nonetheless some people liked my show.

So what are the Keitaigirls? Maybe I let others explain it, the famous blog “Fleshbot” once wrote:

Through his “Keitai Girls” series of pretty models with cell phones (often nude, and sometimes wearing things like wigs, bondage gear, spaghetti, body paint, or clown makeup as a bonus), German photographer Juergen Specht may have done the next to impossible: singelehandedly cornered the market on a whole new fetish. “It all started as a joke … This developed its own dynamic and here is the first part of my Keitai Girls.” And he did it in Japan, no less, home of just about every existing kink you can think of. We’re impressed.

The longer story goes like this: 10 years ago one of my models got a call in the middle of a photo shooting. It took rather long and I was standing there with my camera in my hand…so I just decided to take pictures while she used her Keitai (if you still don’t know what a Keitai is – it’s the Japanese word for mobile phone).

After this first time, I started in most of my shootings also to take a picture of the model and a Keitai. Now – 10 years later – its hard to stop, its almost like a ritual for me and models who worked with me before even remind me to take the Keitai shot. While preparing for the show, I found more than 150 pictures of girls with a Keitai, 117 of them are now (re-)published. However, if you also count my street portraits and other pictures I took of girls holding a Keitai, I counted more than 600 (!) pictures in my entire Keitaigirls series…

It is really a series in progress and one day this might become a book.

Update:

Photo One Night by Ken Lee/Artsyken

My buddy Ken just sent me this snap shot from yesterdays show. The picture shown on the screen can be seen in all its glory here.